Eugenia Loli Archive

Descriptive quote from the OSOpinion editorial: "Linux has not aggressively exploited the nearly two-year gap between the release of Windows 2000 and the release of Windows XP. With the Home Edition of XP now the standard operating system shipped with most PCs, Linux advocates can no longer use the instability of Windows 95/98/Me as an argument for Linux. Linux advocates missed a golden opportunity to evangelize their platform to these third-party hardware and software companies. Instead, they spent their time arguing over issues like whether KDE or Gnome was a better desktop environment, ignoring how confusing that topic was to other developers." Our Take: I agree that XP is the best offering overall in the OS world today. Faster, much more solid, lots of advances both in the backend in the front end. Life goes on in the Linux camp though, and kernel 2.4.11 was released yesterday. Changelog here.

BeGroovy is running an article claiming that the BeOS source code was distributed via the BeOS-only chatting and file exchange application, BeShare, resulting in the shut down of the main BeShare server. Several people (and BeShare users) have replied to the article stating that there was indeed a leak some weeks ago, but there are two important makefiles missing in order to build successfully the whole system. They also claim that new features like an updated Media Kit and new versions of Interface Kit and App_server can be found there as well as many new drivers. Our Take: If all these new features are true, it is such a shame that Be was sold out to Palm before they could make a new BeOS release out of it. Leaks are never good of course, but the OpenBeOS guys may kill for pieces of that code!

Tao Group is a well known name in the embedded systems market, but they became very popular when Amiga, Inc. licensed their products for the next generation of Amiga, AmigaDE. The Tao Development Team answers today a series of questions regarding AmigaDE, Tao's relationship with Amiga, Inc. and their technology they offer in general. They also clear up some misunderstanding that seem to exist regarding what AmigaDE really is, and they offer to our readers a number of cool screenshots of the platform.

"GTK+ is emerging as a standard for both open-source and commercial software on Linux. Soon to be released GTK+ version 2.0 provides advantages for the user and programmer as well as for people deploying the resulting applications. Users will appreciate the enhanced functionality of existing and new widgets as well as the improvements to the look and feel of the user interface. Programmers will find the powerful new widgets easier to use and more functional. Markets will grow with the ports to additional windowing systems and the enhanced internationalization." Owen Taylor writes. Read the rest of this very interesting tech article on the upcoming release of GTK 2.0. The article is available in Postscript and PDF format.

AtheOS, the promising 32-bit multithreading OS, has been given a positive three page article on the UK Linux Magazine, including the latest version of the OS on the cover CD. Scans of the article can be found here, but if you are living in UK, get to your local newsagent and grab a copy! On the whole, the article is very positive and accurate. Nice to see AtheOS getting the popularity and attention it deserves and a thank you goes to Vanders for posting the article.

Matt Dillon, not the famous actor but the kernel/VM FreeBSD hacker also well known for writting the Dice C compiler for the Amiga, is here with us today for an in-depth interview about everything regarding FreeBSD 5.0. This is the OS that all the techie people are waiting for and presenting it as the most advanced, technically-speaking, free OS of today. Additionally, we also include two mini interviews with Theo de Raadt, the OpenBSD founder, and Jun-ichiro "itojun" Hagino from the NetBSD Core Team.

To pick up the slack from the recent WindRiver news, the DaemonNews Mall announced that we will be publishing our own FreeBSD CD sets, beginning with the next release, 4.5, scheduled for January 2002. They will also offer subscription plans. Here's the entire article.

John Everitt writes: "This is an opinion page, it is riddled with minor inconsistencies and represents nobody's opinion other than my own. Some of it is not based on hard evidence, but observation and wit. If you don't like that stop reading here. Freenet is a realisation of many concepts that have been floated in the charged ether of the Internet. It is a distributed, survivable, efficient, secure publishing and storage system. In practice this has proven largely true, with minor caveats (documented in the FAQ), and I believe that Freenet should be a discussion point for everyone."

Fink is a distribution of ported Unix software for MacOSX and Darwin. Using a combination of a custom build engine and Debian's dpkg package manager and related tools, Fink can either build packages from source on your Mac, or download binary packages from the distribution site. Fink 0.3.0 was released this Saturday, and the process of updating the binary packages was finished today. Visit the Fink download area for the whole range of upgrade and fresh install options. Visit the package database for a list of available packages (400 packages up to now have been ported over).

The KDE Project today announced the release of KDE 3.0 Alpha1. This is a developer-only release and it is making full use of Trolltech's QT 3 API. The release brings an impressive array of new features to KDE developers, including new database classes, new data-aware widgets, improved RAD development with a much-enhanced Qt Designer, a new powerful regular expression class (with full Unicode support), improved internationalization support (including the ability to mix different character sets in the same text), bi-directional language support (for languages such as Arabic and Hebrew), multi-monitor (Xinerama and multi-screen) support, better integration of pure Qt applications into KDE, and hardware-accelerated alpha blending. With the QT3 port out of the way, the KDE developers can now focus on the new KDE improvements.

It is not just KDE and Gnome for X11 in this world that get new releases. XFCE, the CDE look-alike window manager, reached version 3.8.8 recently, WindowMaker released version 0.70.0 while Afterstep had a new release too after a long time. Coupled with the brand new version of Crux, the lightweight Linux distribution, developed and maintained by a single person in his free time, can work wonders for your... geeky OS experiements this weekend.

Danger Research (which employs 9 ex-Be, Inc. engineers out of about 20 engineers total) is a company that does not talk too much about their product, but it is already known that they are developing a PDA that is able to send and receive email and access the Net among other goodies. Danger hoped to be the first company to have a PDA product that will feature the full range of Internet connectivity, but it seems that the market is getting "dangerously" crowded. RIM already is talking about an updated version of BlackBerry that does more, Motorola have already announced a device oh-so-similar to Danger's, and now even Sharp with a Linux-oriented device is doing the same. Handspring, which this week announced a deal with Aether Systems, is partnering with other companies to bring corporate data to its handhelds while Good Technology, which was founded in March 2000, prepares a similar product too. Also Motient, a wireless data network company plans to unveil a device that effectively allows a Palm handheld to act more like a BlackBerry pager. The plan in most of these devices is to have the device always connected to the net, as there is a special contract with some major mobile phone networks when you purchase such a device in order to activate it. Our take: Amazingly, Palm still haven't announced something exciting as this (where most of the software running in a remoted server, and not included and running in the actual machine), and please don't start posting comments that they will use BeIA for it, because they just won't. Palm has even postponed any wireless plans.

QSSL has released patch A for QNX 6.1. The patch can be obtained from the standard QNX repository (mind you, you have to be able to connect to the Internet with QNX to get the patch, as it is obtainable with the QNX download manager only). Release notes can be found here.

The release of WindowsXP does not seem to discourage the coders around the world to code the operating system of their dreams. Lots of new, simple and complex, embedded and desktop OSes grow like mushrooms very often these days. Not all of the OSes we found by searching the web are active, but we will link to the ones with more activity.